The Best of the Worlds Classics, Restricted to prose | Page 3

at once. Let him wait until his
thirty-sixth year and then build, provided his whole property is under
cultivation. So build that neither the villa be disproportionately small in

comparison with the farm nor the farm in comparison with the villa. It
behooves a slave-owner to have a well-built country house, containing
a wine-cellar, a place for storing olive-oil, and casks in such numbers
that he may look forward with delight to a time of scarcity and high
prices, and this will add not only to his wealth, but to his influence and
reputation. He must have wine-presses of the first order, that his wine
may be well made. When the olives have been picked, let oil be at once
made or it will turn out rancid. Recollect that every year the olives are
shaken from the trees in great number by violent storms. If you gather
them up quickly and have vessels ready to receive them, the storm will
have done them no harm and the oil will be all the greener and better. If
the olives be on the ground or even on the barn floor too long, the oil
made from them will be fetid. Olive-oil will be always good and sweet
if it be promptly made.
The following are the duties of a steward: He must maintain strict
discipline, and see that the festivals are observed. While he keeps his
hands off the property of a neighbor, let him look well to his own. The
slaves are to be kept from quarreling. If any of them commits a fault, he
should be punished in a kindly manner. The steward must see that the
slaves are comfortable and suffer neither from cold nor hunger. By
keeping them busy he will prevent them from running into mischief or
stealing. If the steward sets his face against evil doing, evil will not be
done by them. His master must call him to task if he let evil doing go
unpunished. If one slave do him any service, he should show gratitude
that the others may be encouraged to do right. The steward must not be
a gadder or a diner-out, but must give all his attention to working the
slaves, and considering how best to carry out his master's
instructions....
It is at times worth while to gain wealth by commerce, were it not so
perilous; or by usury, were it equally honorable. Our ancestors,
however, held, and fixt by law, that a thief should be condemned to
restore double, a usurer quadruple. We thus see how much worse they
thought it for a citizen to be a money-lender than a thief. Again, when
they praised a good man, they praised him as a good farmer or a good
husbandman. Men so praised were held to have received the highest

praise. For myself, I think well of a merchant as a man of energy and
studious of gain; but it is a career, as I have said, that leads to danger
and ruin. However, farming makes the bravest men and the sturdiest
soldiers, and of all sources of gain is the surest, the most natural, and
the least invidious, and those who are busy with it have the fewest bad
thoughts.[3]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Cato was Rome's first thoroughly national author. He is
usually classed as the creator of Latin prose. Other Roman authors of
his time wrote in Greek. Cato bitterly opposed Greek learning,
declaring that, when Greece should give Rome her literature, she would
"corrupt everything." On Cato's mind no outside literary influence ever
prevailed. He has been called "the most original writer that Rome ever
produced."]
[Footnote 2: From "De Re Rustica." Translated for this work by Dr.
Epiphanius Wilson.]
[Footnote 3: The translation of this paragraph is taken from Cruttwell's
"History of Roman Literature."]

CICERO
Born in 106 B.C., assassinated in 43; celebrated as orator, philosopher,
statesman, and man of letters; served in the social war in 89; traveled in
Greece and Asia in 79-77; questor in Sicily in 75; accused Verres in 70;
prætor in 60; as Consul supprest Catiline's conspiracy in 63; banished
in 58; recalled in 57; proconsul in Cicilia in 51-50; joined Pompey in
49; pronounced orations against Mark Antony in 44-43; proscribed by
the Second Triumvirate in 43; of his orations fifty-seven are extant,
with fragments of twenty others; other extant works include "De
Oratore," "De Republica," "Cato Major," "De Officiis," and four
collections of letters.
I

THE BLESSINGS OF OLD AGE[4]
Nor even now do I feel the want of the strength of a young man, no
more than when a young man I felt the want of the strength of the bull
or of the elephant. What one has, that one ought to use; and whatever
you do, you should